I am yours very faithful, RICHARD WAGNER.
Wagner arrived at midnight precisely on Sunday, the fifth of March.
If I had not already acquired through the graphic letters of August Roeckel an insight into the peculiarities of Richard Wagner’s habits of thought, power of grasping profound questions of mental speculation, whilst relieving the severity of serious discourse by the intermingling of jocular ebulitions of fancy, I was soon to have a fair specimen of these wondrous qualities. One of the many points in which we found ourselves at home, was the habit of citing phrases from Schiller or Goethe, as applicable to our subjects of discussion, as often ironically as seriously. To these we added an almost interminable dictionary of quotations from the plays and operas of the early part of the century. These mental links were, in the course of a long and intimate friendship, augmented by references to striking qualities, defects, or oddities, our circle of acquaintances forming a means of communication between us which might not inaptly be likened to mental shorthand. Nothing could have exceeded the hilarity, when, upon showing him, at an advanced hour, to his bedroom, he enthusiastically said, “August was right; we shall understand each other thoroughly!” I felt in an exalted position, and dreamed that, like Spontini, I had received a new decoration from some potentate which delighted me, but the pleasant dream soon turned to nightmare, when I could find no room on my coat to place the newly acquired bauble. The next morning I found the signification of the dream. Exalted positions have their duties as well as their pleasures, and it became my duty to acquaint Wagner that a so-called “Necker” hat (_i.e._ a slouched one) was not becoming for the conductor of so conservative a society as the Philharmonic, and that it was necessary that he should provide himself with a tall hat, indeed, such headgear as would efface all remembrance of the social class to which his soft felt hat was judicially assigned, for, be it known, in some parts of Germany the soft slouched felt hat had been interdicted by police order as being the emblem of revolutionary principles. I think it was on the strength of the accuracy of this last statement that Wagner gave way, and I at once followed up the success by taking the composer of “Tannhäuser” to the best West End hatter, where, after an onslaught on the sons of Britannia and their manias, we succeeded in fitting a hat on that wondrous head of the great thinker. I could not help sarcastically joking Wagner on his compulsory leave-taking with the “revolutionary” hat for four months,--the time he was to sojourn amongst us,--by citing from Schiller’s “Fiesco” the passage about the fall of the hero’s cloak into the water, upon which Verina pushes him after it with the sinister words, “When the purple falls, the duke must follow.” As to Richard Wagner’s democratic principles, I observed that the solitude of exile had considerably modified them. This I noticed to my surprise and no less pain, for, when I anxiously inquired after our poor friend, August Roeckel, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Perhaps he tries to revolutionize the prison warders, for the ‘Wuhlers’” (uprooters, a name of the period) “are never at rest in their self-elected role of reformers!” I, who knew the unambitious, self-sacrificing nature of the poor prisoner, felt a pang of disappointment at Wagner’s remark, and had often to suffer the same when the year 1849 was mentioned.